I haven't been posting about what I've done much since I stopped playing on my first world last year to focus more on updating TMCW, which has turned into a much bigger task than any previous update, in part because of the major code rewrites that I've been doing (similar to how updates like 1.8 and 1.13 took so long).

In the meantime I decided to recreate one of my earliest worlds, and the first modded world that I made, which originally used a mod called "Fewer Ravines Less Caves" (no longer available due to the thread being deleted) to increase cave generation to 200% of vanilla, and I called it "InfiniteCaves", using the seed for my first world set to Large Biomes and the spawn point edited to -2516, 2564, which was in a Plains near Extreme Hills and Desert (IIRC, I originally chose this location and Large Biomes since this would place it in an area which I hadn't explored yet in the original seed, and for the most part, haven't since since this area is mostly ocean in Default). I also pregenerated the original world since the mod was for 1.5.2 and I was playing in 1.6.2 at the time (there's no way I'd give up being able to craft coal into blocks, especially as I used Fortune for a while back then, I also originally used several Forge mods, notably a backpack mod), and used MCEdit to remove lava from the lowest layers and replace the upper layers of bedrock with stone, and copied my main base from my first world.

The recreation is very similar, except I made my own modifications to cave generator to the same effect (cave density is actually 1.875 times higher due to rounding; I still had a decompiled class from FRLC, which helped me start modding caves myself) and modified bedrock to one layer; instead of removing all lava I lowered it to layer 2 (vanilla caves never go deeper than y=2 even with no bedrock in the way), which gives an overall air volume that is closer to double that of vanilla (61 layers vs 52 layers between lava and sea levels). In either case ores were not adjusted (I adjusted ores in later mods to give a similar ratio between rarer ores and coal/iron as vanilla; TMCW currently lowers lava level to y=4, giving 3 layers of lava and 59 layers between lava level and sea level).

I did not use any other mods, aside from the same tweaks/bugfixes that I use on my first world, while I set the time to always day to force mobs to always spawn underground, an idea that I've had before but didn't try until now (many people do the opposite for the challenge of it always being night but with my playstyle that would actually make it easier). Instead of using MCEdit to copy a base over I used Creative to build it and give myself the items I use while caving; the world was otherwise played entirely in Survival with no cheats (I actually made it in a separate world and copied the region files over).

This is what I've explored so far; it has turned out to be the 5th longest-played world out of the worlds that I have, and likely longer than the original, with more than 225000 ore mined over 71 play sessions and 9.14 days (an average of 1026 ore mined per hour and 3169 per session, compared 816 and 3142 in TMCWv4 when excluding the time I didn't cave, which is the entire time that I've spent on this world):

This rendering was taken after removing unexplored chunks (without torches), which left 5268 out of 8445 chunks:

Here are screenshots that I took:

The following three screenshots are of the same cave:

This is not due to increased cave density but I thought it was interesting due to the size of the opening (individual caves/tunnels are the same as vanilla):

The peak density of these cave systems actually isn't much higher than vanilla since I only changed their frequency, not size, which is why vanilla 1.6.4 has much denser and larger cave systems than 1.7 even though they are nearly twice as common in 1.7, with 77% as many caves in 1.7 and 1.6.4 (1.6.4 has a size/chance of 40 (0-39) and 1/15 while 1.7+ is 15 (0-14) and 1/7, and "double" 1.6.4 cave generation is 40 and 1/8. The same overall cave density can also be achieved by setting the size to 74 (0-73) while leaving the chance at 1/15, which would increase the per-cave system density by about 1.87 times).

Also, while I mined about twice as much redstone and diamond when compared to vanilla (relative to coal and iron, which are unaffected by changes to the ground depth) this still made diamond about 24 times rarer than iron (a ratio of 6:1 is needed to offset the differences in tool durability, which is about what branch-mining yields when Fortune is not used); I did mine as much as 88 diamond ore in a single session though, exceeding my previous record of 62 (from a mineshaft entirely below layer 16 in vanilla). Notably, I also set a new all-time record for the most ore I've ever mined in a single play session, 5669 (both since I added the per-session stats back in 2014), breaking a record set more than 3 years ago (which was also in vanilla), with a total of about 7848 resources collected when including multiple drops, including coal used for torches (I did not take a screenshot of my ender chest, which I emptied out during the session):

Interestingly, I only found a single ravine (on average there are about 100 ravines in the area I've explored) that was deep enough to have lava at the bottom; this can only happen if they are near their maximum depth and minimum altitude, which are 45 blocks (corresponding to a maximum width of 15 and a height that is 3 times that, with the floor/ceiling being half this from the center) and y=20 respectively (ranging from 20-66 with more near the low end). Here is a comparison of air volume with altitude for vanilla and many of my mods, including the overall volume within a 65536 chunk area (I did not actually generate worlds but used a tool I made which simulates generating a flat world and caves and is far faster):

I've also been using this world to test some changes being implemented in TMCWv5, notably to the rendering system (I've decided to break full Optifine compatibility as this means I can make my own changes to rendering much more easily, including optimizations and bug fixes (for example, MC-43968 and MC-138211); Optifine can still be used but features like Better Grass/Snow and Fast/Fancy grass won't work (grass is permanently set to Fancy, as are dropped items, both of which render much faster than vanilla; Optifine doesn't optimize block/item rendering, only how chunks themselves are rendered and sent to the GPU).

Also, something else that I plan to do is fix up some of my older worlds, which used some Forge mods like the backpack mod mentioned before (I no longer have any of them and some are no longer available at all due to the downloads/threads being deleted) and an amethyst armor/tools mod (not the same as what TMCW has), by removing these modded items and replacing them with vanilla or my own equivalents so the only mods required are my own (this will require save editing, e.g. using MCEdit to remove/replace amethyst ore, which uses block ID 2000 and can't be loaded by vanilla without fixing the 256 ID issue (the easiest fix is to shift item IDs up so they start at 4096 instead of 256, but that breaks all items in existing worlds), or patching the chunk loader (this part of vanilla does support 4096 IDs) to automatically convert it to a different ID. In at least one of the worlds I last stopped playing while I was out caving, and the backpacks are filled with items which I wouldn't want to lose even if they don't actually matter; of course, in all cases the armor/tools I'm carrying need to be replaced with diamond or my own amethyst items).

I was looking through a folder on my desktop labelled "Minecraft Other" and saw a folder called "World2", what I called my main world of 8 years+ in the early days. I thought it strange as I have a back up folder on a different drive so I don't keep saves there, and when I looked inside the folder it was definitely an alpha files set up. Now I know this is not an original because I never kept (if any) back ups in my early days, but I was curious.

I opened it up in the last Alpha version available and came across this:

I really didn't remember building this at first, but obviously did at some point. I guess I took a copy of my main world back to the past using old versions and tied to go to alpha, but the furthest I can go back is beta 1.4 because the worlds had a few accidental deletions back in the early days. (One due to a power cut, the other I'm still not sure but I always guess with my tower lower down then I accidentally kneed the power button?)

I guess I tried to go back to alpha or re-use the seed, but as it so often doesn't work out I usually don't keep the save, odd that I should this time and store it somewhere like that. I'm not sure whether to keep it now or what I'd do with it. I moved it to beta 1.0 then after a play and growing tired of a chest bug moved it to b1.0_01 but whether I keep it or not remains to be seen.

I have finished the eastern block. Underground secure (for the most part), ground lit up, border wall built, area around recovered. It's ready for some buildings.

But that is boring compared to dual monster spawner processing facility. Basically, I have aranea and resurectus spawners relatively close to each other. Aranei were pain in the ass. Ledges everywhere, so they can't just climb walls and stay there. Water will take them and drops them into collection area, aka bell (it used to look like bell, because I've been worried about aranei sticking to walls, if they would be too close, so the lower they fall, the further walls are. Turns out, it was not needed), which is about 35 m fall. It's overkill for aranei, sure, but not for resurecti, since they spawn with armor sometimes. That was the reason behind going with bottom of the bell as low as I could. Resurecti enjoy 58 m long fall.

It wouldn't be me, if I didn't rebuild most if it sever times, but it's done and with good specs now. This was my first construction of this type. Partially under water, because of course.

Build has central staircase/elevators, which get you anywhere. Bottom collection room, observation rooms for the spawners, access to their rooms, access to top of the bell, where if you stand just right, aranei will spawn and you can watch them fall (it's kind of fun, actually). Everything is in 1.12.2, but ready for 1.13. Mainly the resurectus part will work better, since they have about 50 m of water elevators. Now they swim, sometimes take suffocation damage, but then, they'll fly up fast.

Buliding the central staircase was pretty much the first thing I did (zeroth being recon what will be where, how it will be connected, what need to be built and so on). The underground was under ocean, so after outer wall was done, I've put lava on top of the water and then just took out all the stone from below. Relatively fast water draining.

Recently I've started playing on a multiplayer server with some brainstorming friends, PyxelVector and Wolftopia.

We are on a SMP server called Kronos. We have a decent amount of resources now, having raided a few end cities but no luck so far with the elytra. Today, I spent most my time on retrofitting our Nether Portal and landscaping the surrounding area.

I have just started a playthrough of Modded Minecraft v1.12.2 with a personal technology plus nature magic modpack that I have affectionately called Viridian.

It is a modpack which additions feel like an organic part of Minecraft more or less, rather than a complete departure from the original game itself (including the emphasis on default decoration and building blocks).

The choice of the Shader Pack itself (I am using Sildur's Enhanced Default v1.071) was also taken into account, the shader pack is an enhancement of Minecraft's lighting engine rather than a complete replacement of it.

I decided to tailor the modpack in such a way because I am interested on improving my default Minecraft building and Redstone skills while also enjoying the modded Minecraft experience that I developed a strong taste for over the years.

I also play Vanilla Minecraft (Bedrock) on the side because I am hoping to eventually design Adventure and Minigame maps for public release and, hopefully, eventually also the Minecraft Store.

I have just finished building my very first house which will serve as the starting point of my adventure within the modpack, and I have some pictures to share (the interiors are a work in progress)!

I recently started trying the new features coming in 1.14 by creating a new world in the latest snapshot.

Here's my home at the moment.

The chimney to the right goes to the smoker, and the left to two furnaces serving in the area designated as the smithy. Apart from that, the house is basically just a staircase down all the way to level 4, with a small room with a double chest along the way.
There is also a beach nearby where I grow kelp on which I've sustained myself until now. What I'd like to do next is to find a nearby village.

Northern colony. Finally. Compare this map with the one couple posts before.

So, basically: Extension of the northern highway, about 0,6 km from last position, leaving the colony about 1,5 km from my home. Although this number is hard to say, because my home is…what? Imperial border wall? Old house or the new one? Central point of all 3 blocks of the empire?

Anyway. That is the overall map. It's only 2 days old, but I've made some progress wit preparing the land in future colony to be in standard. So here is minimap of just that colony:

Highway leads to small horse station, which is connected to building's core (stairs and elevators), and then 3 rooms around it. It's unusually small scale build for me, but I really needed something done, fast. Roof already has the signature diorite surface. And next to that, 25 piceae gigants. Unimaginable, how much wood I needed. Around the building, there is future imperial land, which in the north-eastern sector is not leveled yet due to changes in plans (extension). And around that, the exclusion zone. Everything leveled with chunk granularity, I take whole chunks, round borders to chunk.

And for those of you, who want to see how it looks like, boots on the ground, here it is:

↑ Colonial home and small scale tree farm. Looking from leveled land.

↑ End of the northern highway, for now. And horse station for this home.

↑ Front lobby in new home.

↑ Storage for stuff from animals/mobs. Column for hostiles and then 4 others, 2 crates have no usage for now. And yes, that on the right is missing hoppers. I did not have had the time to put them there.

↑ And labels, of course, in latin. And since we're in north, there is a lot of nix (and yes, I will not say what it is, but you can figure it out yourself :-) ).

↑ Sunset from balcony with most of leveled land. That land needs lighting and granitum walls around it.

↑ Still from balcony, my small scale tree farm and closer look at my home.

↑ You see, if I decide how borders will be, I don't care. About anything. I'll cut through mountains, fill up rivers, cover ravines, I really don't care. There is the empire and everything else will bend to the will of the empire.

↑ Snow covered trees, behind which is land, which still needs leveling. And my experiments with explosions on ice. Interesting results in deed.

↑ Looking south, towards home. This is the northern highway.

↑ And from the same spot look at current state of northern colony. There is not much there, YET.

↑ I've bend this part of the highway in such way, because I need future land to be clear of anything. I have plans for some buildings there. And that lave there? Yeah, I have plans for it too.

↑ One of those new buildings will be for rabbits. Colony absolutely needs to be self-sufficient and living there must be sustainable. And my food of choice? Rabbits. I know! Pigs would be better. Or even chickens. But I'm sick of those. I don't have much rabbits in the empire, because…they're not that „profitable“. Here? Situation is different.

↑ That little crack in the hill on the right is my mark, where to dig when leveling. It's limiter. This limit the exclusion zone.

↑ And just look at the colonial home together with horse station from highway. Front lobby down, 1st floor with most storage, furnaces and so on, and then 2nd floor, where rabbits reside for now, and where my bedroom is.

I made one of the most significant optimizations that I've made so far - speeding up the rendering of Fancy clouds by a factor of more than 15-fold:

(I took this right after enabling F3 so the debug screen itself didn't affect FPS, which is about half as high afterwards. Note that I also changed the coordinates a bit so integer coordinates are displayed first)

I optimized clouds by using a display list to render them instead of re-drawing them every frame, which is much more expensive (this is why entities cause so much lag compared to blocks), so much that the optimized Fancy clouds take only half the time to render as vanilla Fast clouds, and nearly as fast as optimized Fast clouds, as well as optimizing hidden faces and the size of the cloud field (vanilla always renders a +/- 256 block area for Fast clouds and +/- 288 blocks for Fancy clouds).

This will also be in TMCWv5, and Optifine's cloud settings are compatible since I extended the vanilla (modified by Optifine) RenderGlobal class, which conveniently made the renderClouds method public even though it isn't called from outside of it; I also used reflection for the first time to access fields that Optifine adds to the GameSettings class (which are not present without Optifine, so you can't just access them the normal way; I found the field names Optifine uses by decompiling it), which was actually pretty easy to do (much more difficult would be indirectly modifying code by changing bytecode as some mods do; it appears that I'd have to include a library with the mod).

Also, this give you an idea of the performance of TMCWv5 (actually, using a modified version of Optifine, but my own changes are largely responsible; Optifine doesn't actually do that much, mainly changes how chunk updates are scheduled to reduce their effect on FPS, and gives you more control over graphics):

140 FPS and 320 MB of memory usage on 20 chunk render distance, while 1.13 ran at about 70 FPS and used over 500 MB on 8 chunks when I last tested it (back in July, I have not run any newer version, including 1.14 with its supposedly improved rendering system), and has 2 GB allocated to it by default if you have a 64 bit OS, with 32 bit having (had) various issues due to its resource requirements (switching dimensions might still be an issue here as twice as many chunks are loaded for a while) - it's just insane what Mojang has been doing to the game since around 1.8 (of course, you need an Nvidia GPU to really take advantage of Advanced OpenGL, which was the occlusion culling method used before 1.8 and reduces the number of rendered chunk sections to less than that on Normal with it turned off (in the screenshot only 382 out of 6743 non-empty sections are being rendered); Intel and AMD don't really care about OpenGL compatibility, which also causes issues on newer versions). This also doesn't consider bugs in newer versions.

Also, on the screenshot of the settings you may notice that I added an "offset" slider, which I used to rescale calculated brightness levels by (brightness * (offset + 1) - offset) so a light level of 1 appears similar to a light level of 0 in vanilla, which in turn is pure black, regardless of the brightness setting, as shown below, which will also be in TMCWv5 (I've hardcoded it into TMCWv5 with a value of 0.1, with the gamma setting scaling the offset (offset * gamma, so Moody is 0 and Bright is 0.1; a light level of 0,0 is independently forced to 0); much like how I overrode cloud rendering TMCW overrides the vanilla method that calculates the light table so this is Optifine-compatible, but custom lightmaps will not work as that means copying actual code from Optifine):

On the left is Moody and on the right is Bright; in both the pixel that corresponds to a light level of 0,0 (sky, block) is completely black - no matter how high you try to increase the brightness of your monitor it will only appear as a gray color with no details (gamma also can't be set outside of the range of 0-1, which wouldn't work anyway on a light level of 0,0):

Notably, the highest three block light levels are all visually same on Bright, and even on Moody the highest two are the same, which I'd never noticed until recently (the highest light levels are also slightly dimmer than maximum brightness, with pixel values of 252 instead of 255. The Moody light table is identical to vanilla except for the lowest light level, while Bright is slightly dimmer for levels between 1-14, more so for lower levels). This also shows why I don't like Moody - notice how fast the light level drops off from the highest 2 levels, and even more so for sky light, where level 14 is noticeably dimmer (above the lower-left pixel, which is with 0 block light; color values are 250 for level 15 and 197 for level 14, so even full daylight is slightly dimmer than the maximum brightness unless there is some block light present).

A partially lit cave on Bright:

This shows a torch against a background of quartz blocks, which also shows other changes - smooth lighting bugs (MC-43968 and MC-138211) were mostly fixed (there is still some irregularity near the edges of lit areas due to MC-138211 which is problematic to fully fix, especially when both smooth lighting and ambient occlusion need to be corrected on the same face, so I only fixed it for ambient occlusion, where it is much more noticeable due to the much greater contrast across a block face and being easily visible regardless of lighting):

For comparison, this is what you get in vanilla (using an example from the bug report); the blockiness occurs because the code that mixes the light levels around each vertex assigns the light level above the face of the block being rendered to any of the other three adjacent faces if they have a light level of 0 and mixes them together as 4 values; I instead ignore neighbors that are in a solid block and mix the remaining faces for both a smooth transition between light level 0-1 (or higher, this helps make black lighting glitches look smoother as well) and where the number of exposed faces changes:

Also, this shows lit redstone ore (only the center block), which has smooth lighting, unlike all light-emitting blocks in vanilla (I did not apply it to every block, like glowstone, and for some others, like glass, only smooth lighting itself is applied, not ambient occlusion, which is actually a separate effect which darkens corners):

Of interest, the game can render blocks with intermediate light levels; I increased the rendered brightness of blocks with a light level of 1 to be equivalent to 1.5 so they are more visible, without affecting how light levels 1-2 appear on other blocks. Blocks with a light level of 15 are also rendered fully lit at all times instead of reading the saved light levels, so they will be lit even in a black lighting glitch, so e.g. lava will be clearly visible in an otherwise dark cave (these still occur in TMCWv5 but are much less common and you can press F4 to re-run the method that fixes them in chunks within the ticking area around the player; the main reason these glitches persist is because the code that fixes them only runs after a chunk is generated and doesn't save its state after a chunk is unloaded before it has finished (chunks near the edge may never run it at all since they don't tick) and never starts again, and the check takes quite a while in vanilla; improvements to the lighting engine allow me to run it 8 times faster).

I fixed Night Vision as well (MC-58177; note how easy the fix is, Mojang not fixing things like this bugs me to no end) so it doesn't have weird colored lighting artifacts and appears the same on Moody and Bright by overriding gamma to always be 1 when it is in effect (in vanilla even blocks with a light level of 15 appear darker than they should be on Moody), and added an interesting feature to TMCW - the phase of the moon affects how dark it is at night, with the light level during a full moon being around 4 (vanilla) and a new moon around 2, with other phases being in between.

Another change that I made is to remove the "vignette" effect on Fancy (the darkening around the edges of the screen, especially in lower light levels; this is one reason why I've always used Fast and set various things to Fancy; leaves still cause issues in my modded biomes with giant trees since they render every face, not just ones that are visible, which has a major effect on how much needs to be rendered but I prefer Fast leaves anyway (a 16x16x16 cube of leaves has 1536 faces on Fast and 24576 on Fancy, a 16-fold difference. The actual number of faces on screen is half this since you can only see faces that face you, which is why x-ray lets you see inside of caves). Even then, I could probably improve them by removing smooth lighting from interior faces, where it wouldn't be that noticeable (smooth lighting is extremely expensive for chunk updates, taking about 5 times longer to render than without, even after optimizations, the effect on steady-state FPS is negligible since the game always sets brightness and color values for each vertex whether or not smooth lighting is enabled).

Also, in my "InfiniteCaves" world I recently found the densest near surface cave system that I can recall, including a huge surface crater formed by one of the larger single caves that I've seen in vanilla (as mentioned before, tunnels themselves are not different from vanilla; in TMCW such large openings aren't unusual and can reach ridiculous sizes):

The deeper layers were filled with mineshafts (I did not add the code that I've added to TMCW and even my first world that excludes them from dense cave systems, with about 25% removed in my first world and 40% removed in TMCW. Even with more caves I've sometimes felt that I've spent more time exploring mineshafts than caves):

I realized how much I dislike the new textures for 1.14, but I have no alternatives because everything new is going to be in this style. (I confused andesite with light grey wool. I don't even own wool.)

I began adding segments to my cave base (finally.) I first created a bedroom complete with a light that activates once I can sleep. The redstone isn't very expensive or difficult, either.

.

That's the entire thing. I've used it since 1.8 without failure.

I then added an enchantment room, in preparation for my WIP-cow farm.

The gravel that doesn't look like gravel will be replaced with bookshelves as I craft them. The gold pressure plate dispenses lapis. I also remembered about "waste enchantments" for if you need to enchant below max level. Just drown the enchanting table, and it should work.

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Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.

If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.